The War of the Worlds 9 страница

wheels flung behind her, she receded with terrifying slowness from

this ominous advance.

Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of

shipping already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship

passing behind another, another coming round from broadside to end on,

steamships whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being let

out, launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated by

this and by the creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes

for anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the steamboat (she

had suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung him headlong

from the seat upon which he was standing. There was a shouting all

about him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed to be answered

faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over upon his hands.

He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards

from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of

a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge

waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles

helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the

waterline.

A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes

were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing

landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure,

and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot

with fire. It was the torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong,

coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping.

Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks,

my brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again,

and he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far

out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged.

Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less

formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was

pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new

antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the

giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no

gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her

not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They

did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent

her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway

between the steamboat and the Martians--a diminishing black bulk

against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a

canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side

and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an

unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear.

To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in

their eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.

They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water

as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like

generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward,

and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have

driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot iron rod

through paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the

Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and

a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the

_Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the other,

and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted

towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to

matchwood.

But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's

collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the

crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted together. And then

they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove

something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,

its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.

She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and

her engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and

was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then

with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped

upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and

in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the

impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing

of cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of

steam hid everything again.

"Two!" yelled the captain.

Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with

frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the

crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.

The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third

Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was

paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last

the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened,

and nothing of the _Thunder Child_ could be made out, nor could the

third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite

close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.

The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the

ironclads receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by

a marbled bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and

combining in the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering

to the northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads

and the steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking

cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went

about and passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The

coast grew faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of

clouds that were gathering about the sinking sun.

Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the

vibration of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone

struggled to the rail of the steamer and peered into the blinding

furnace of the west, but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A

mass of smoke rose slanting and barred the face of the sun. The

steamboat throbbed on its way through an interminable suspense.

The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the

evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the

captain cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes.

Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness--rushed

slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above

the clouds in the western sky; something flat and broad, and very

large, that swept round in a vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly,

and vanished again into the grey mystery of the night. And as it flew

it rained down darkness upon the land.

BOOK TWO

THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS

CHAPTER ONE

UNDER FOOT

In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to

tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last two

chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at

Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will

resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day--the

day of the panic--in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black

Smoke from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but wait in

aching inactivity during those two weary days.

My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife. I figured her at

Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man.

I paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off

from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I

knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of

man to realise danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now

was not bravery, but circumspection. My only consolation was to

believe that the Martians were moving London-ward and away from her.

Such vague anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful. I grew very

weary and irritable with the curate's perpetual ejaculations; I tired

of the sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual

remonstrance I kept away from him, staying in a room--evidently a

children's schoolroom--containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When

he followed me thither, I went to a box room at the top of the house

and, in order to be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in.

We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and

the morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house

on Sunday evening--a face at a window and moving lights, and later the

slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what

became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke

drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer

and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house

that hid us.

A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff

with a jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed

all the windows it touched, and scalded the curate's hand as he fled

out of the front room. When at last we crept across the sodden rooms

and looked out again, the country northward was as though a black

snowstorm had passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were

astonished to see an unaccountable redness mingling with the black of

the scorched meadows.

For a time we did not see how this change affected our position,

save that we were relieved of our fear of the Black Smoke. But later

I perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we might get

away. So soon as I realised that the way of escape was open, my dream

of action returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable.

"We are safe here," he repeated; "safe here."

I resolved to leave him--would that I had! Wiser now for the

artilleryman's teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found oil

and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that

I found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant

to go alone--had reconciled myself to going alone--he suddenly roused

himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we

started about five o'clock, as I should judge, along the blackened

road to Sunbury.

In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying

in contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and

luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery

powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii.

We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of

strange and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were

relieved to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating

drift. We went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to and fro

under the chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distance

towards Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These were the first

people we saw.

Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still

afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke,

and there were more people about here, though none could give us news.

For the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a lull

to shift their quarters. I have an impression that many of the houses

here were still occupied by scared inhabitants, too frightened even

for flight. Here too the evidence of a hasty rout was abundant along

the road. I remember most vividly three smashed bicycles in a heap,

pounded into the road by the wheels of subsequent carts. We crossed

Richmond Bridge about half past eight. We hurried across the exposed

bridge, of course, but I noticed floating down the stream a number

of red masses, some many feet across. I did not know what these

were--there was no time for scrutiny--and I put a more horrible

interpretation on them than they deserved. Here again on the Surrey

side were black dust that had once been smoke, and dead bodies--a heap

near the approach to the station; but we had no glimpse of the

Martians until we were some way towards Barnes.

We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running

down a side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemed

deserted. Up the hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the

town of Richmond there was no trace of the Black Smoke.

Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people

running, and the upperworks of a Martian fighting-machine loomed in

sight over the housetops, not a hundred yards away from us. We stood

aghast at our danger, and had the Martian looked down we must

immediately have perished. We were so terrified that we dared not go

on, but turned aside and hid in a shed in a garden. There the curate

crouched, weeping silently, and refusing to stir again.

But my fixed idea of reaching Leatherhead would not let me rest,

and in the twilight I ventured out again. I went through a shrubbery,

and along a passage beside a big house standing in its own grounds,

and so emerged upon the road towards Kew. The curate I left in the

shed, but he came hurrying after me.

That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it

was manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate

overtaken me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen

before or another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew

Lodge. Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the

green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian

pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and they ran

radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to

destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed

them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much

as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.

It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any

other purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. We stood for a

moment petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us into a

walled garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and

lay there, scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were

out.

I suppose it was nearly eleven o'clock before we gathered courage

to start again, no longer venturing into the road, but sneaking along

hedgerows and through plantations, and watching keenly through the

darkness, he on the right and I on the left, for the Martians, who

seemed to be all about us. In one place we blundered upon a scorched

and blackened area, now cooling and ashen, and a number of scattered

dead bodies of men, burned horribly about the heads and trunks but

with their legs and boots mostly intact; and of dead horses, fifty

feet, perhaps, behind a line of four ripped guns and smashed gun

carriages.

Sheen, it seemed, had escaped destruction, but the place was silent

and deserted. Here we happened on no dead, though the night was too

dark for us to see into the side roads of the place. In Sheen my

companion suddenly complained of faintness and thirst, and we decided

to try one of the houses.

The first house we entered, after a little difficulty with the

window, was a small semi-detached villa, and I found nothing eatable

left in the place but some mouldy cheese. There was, however, water

to drink; and I took a hatchet, which promised to be useful in our

next house-breaking.

We then crossed to a place where the road turns towards Mortlake.

Here there stood a white house within a walled garden, and in the

pantry of this domicile we found a store of food--two loaves of bread

in a pan, an uncooked steak, and the half of a ham. I give this

catalogue so precisely because, as it happened, we were destined to

subsist upon this store for the next fortnight. Bottled beer stood

under a shelf, and there were two bags of haricot beans and some limp

lettuces. This pantry opened into a kind of wash-up kitchen, and in

this was firewood; there was also a cupboard, in which we found nearly

a dozen of burgundy, tinned soups and salmon, and two tins of

biscuits.

We sat in the adjacent kitchen in the dark--for we dared not strike

a light--and ate bread and ham, and drank beer out of the same bottle.

The curate, who was still timorous and restless, was now, oddly

enough, for pushing on, and I was urging him to keep up his strength

by eating when the thing happened that was to imprison us.

"It can't be midnight yet," I said, and then came a blinding glare

of vivid green light. Everything in the kitchen leaped out, clearly

visible in green and black, and vanished again. And then followed such

a concussion as I have never heard before or since. So close on the

heels of this as to seem instantaneous came a thud behind me, a clash

of glass, a crash and rattle of falling masonry all about us, and the

plaster of the ceiling came down upon us, smashing into a multitude of

fragments upon our heads. I was knocked headlong across the floor

against the oven handle and stunned. I was insensible for a long

time, the curate told me, and when I came to we were in darkness

again, and he, with a face wet, as I found afterwards, with blood from

a cut forehead, was dabbing water over me.

For some time I could not recollect what had happened. Then things

came to me slowly. A bruise on my temple asserted itself.

"Are you better?" asked the curate in a whisper.

At last I answered him. I sat up.

"Don't move," he said. "The floor is covered with smashed crockery

from the dresser. You can't possibly move without making a noise, and

I fancy _they_ are outside."

We both sat quite silent, so that we could scarcely hear each other

breathing. Everything seemed deadly still, but once something near

us, some plaster or broken brickwork, slid down with a rumbling sound.

Outside and very near was an intermittent, metallic rattle.

"That!" said the curate, when presently it happened again.

"Yes," I said. "But what is it?"

"A Martian!" said the curate.

I listened again.

"It was not like the Heat-Ray," I said, and for a time I was

inclined to think one of the great fighting-machines had stumbled

against the house, as I had seen one stumble against the tower of

Shepperton Church.

Our situation was so strange and incomprehensible that for three or

four hours, until the dawn came, we scarcely moved. And then the light

filtered in, not through the window, which remained black, but through

a triangular aperture between a beam and a heap of broken bricks in

the wall behind us. The interior of the kitchen we now saw greyly for

the first time.

The window had been burst in by a mass of garden mould, which

flowed over the table upon which we had been sitting and lay about our

feet. Outside, the soil was banked high against the house. At the

top of the window frame we could see an uprooted drainpipe. The floor

was littered with smashed hardware; the end of the kitchen towards the

house was broken into, and since the daylight shone in there, it was

evident the greater part of the house had collapsed. Contrasting

vividly with this ruin was the neat dresser, stained in the fashion,

pale green, and with a number of copper and tin vessels below it, the

wallpaper imitating blue and white tiles, and a couple of coloured

supplements fluttering from the walls above the kitchen range.

As the dawn grew clearer, we saw through the gap in the wall the

body of a Martian, standing sentinel, I suppose, over the still

glowing cylinder. At the sight of that we crawled as circumspectly as

possible out of the twilight of the kitchen into the darkness of the

scullery.

Abruptly the right interpretation dawned upon my mind.

"The fifth cylinder," I whispered, "the fifth shot from Mars, has

struck this house and buried us under the ruins!"

For a time the curate was silent, and then he whispered:

"God have mercy upon us!"

I heard him presently whimpering to himself.

Save for that sound we lay quite still in the scullery; I for my

part scarce dared breathe, and sat with my eyes fixed on the faint

light of the kitchen door. I could just see the curate's face, a dim,

oval shape, and his collar and cuffs. Outside there began a metallic

hammering, then a violent hooting, and then again, after a quiet

interval, a hissing like the hissing of an engine. These noises, for

the most part problematical, continued intermittently, and seemed if

anything to increase in number as time wore on. Presently a measured

thudding and a vibration that made everything about us quiver and the

vessels in the pantry ring and shift, began and continued. Once the

light was eclipsed, and the ghostly kitchen doorway became absolutely

dark. For many hours we must have crouched there, silent and

shivering, until our tired attention failed....

At last I found myself awake and very hungry. I am inclined to

believe we must have spent the greater portion of a day before that

awakening. My hunger was at a stride so insistent that it moved me to

action. I told the curate I was going to seek food, and felt my way

towards the pantry. He made me no answer, but so soon as I began

eating the faint noise I made stirred him up and I heard him crawling

after me.

CHAPTER TWO

WHAT WE SAW FROM THE RUINED HOUSE

After eating we crept back to the scullery, and there I must have

dozed again, for when presently I looked round I was alone. The

thudding vibration continued with wearisome persistence. I whispered

for the curate several times, and at last felt my way to the door of

the kitchen. It was still daylight, and I perceived him across the

room, lying against the triangular hole that looked out upon the

Martians. His shoulders were hunched, so that his head was hidden

from me.

I could hear a number of noises almost like those in an engine

shed; and the place rocked with that beating thud. Through the

aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold

and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky. For a minute or so I

remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and

stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the

floor.

I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that a mass

of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact. I

gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long time we

crouched motionless. Then I turned to see how much of our rampart

remained. The detachment of the plaster had left a vertical slit open

in the debris, and by raising myself cautiously across a beam I was

able to see out of this gap into what had been overnight a quiet

suburban roadway. Vast, indeed, was the change that we beheld.

The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the

house we had first visited. The building had vanished, completely

smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow. The cylinder lay now

far beneath the original foundations--deep in a hole, already vastly

larger than the pit I had looked into at Woking. The earth all round

it had splashed under that tremendous impact--"splashed" is the only

word--and lay in heaped piles that hid the masses of the adjacent

houses. It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a

hammer. Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on

the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance the

kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and

ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards the

cylinder. Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great

circular pit the Martians were engaged in making. The heavy beating

sound was evidently just behind us, and ever and again a bright green

vapour drove up like a veil across our peephole.

The cylinder was already opened in the centre of the pit, and on

the farther edge of the pit, amid the smashed and gravel-heaped

shrubbery, one of the great fighting-machines, deserted by its

occupant, stood stiff and tall against the evening sky. At first I

scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been

convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary

glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of

the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across

the heaped mould near it.

The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first. It

was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called

handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an

enormous impetus to terrestrial invention. As it dawned upon me

first, it presented a sort of metallic spider with five jointed,

agile legs, and with an extraordinary number of jointed levers, bars,

and reaching and clutching tentacles about its body. Most of its

arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing

out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and

apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder. These, as it

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